It's not always been a happy marriage. I guess I wanted a quick fix.

— David Byrne

It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the Bohemian order.

— David Byrne

I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs - is how the world works. The world isn't logical; it's a song.

— David Byrne

Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature.

— David Byrne

Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that they aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically universal? Dan eliminating some portion of the authorial voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic?

— David Byrne

My favorite time of day is to get up and eat leftovers from dinner, especially spicy food.

— David Byrne

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one's own town.

— David Byrne

One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.

— David Byrne

PowerPoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good.

— David Byrne

Presuming that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.

— David Byrne